This post is aimed at helping someone who runs into some misleading RuntimeErrors when using PyTorch’s torch.distributions functions. Specifically, one particular trap/mis-leading- error-message with torch.distributions.MultivariateNormal is discussed in this post and may apply to other distributions as well.
Calling torch.distributions.MultivariateNormal.log_prob(numpy_array) produces RuntimeError: Can't call numpy() on Variable that requires grad. Use var.detach().numpy() instead if the parameter(s) require gradients.
import torch
mu = torch.tensor([0.0, 0.0], requires_grad=True)
sigma = torch.eye(2)
distrib = torch.distributions.MultivariateNormal(mu, sigma)
a = distrib.sample()
#loss = - distrib.log_prob(a) # This will run fine because a is a Tensor
loss_np = - distrib.log_prob(a.numpy())
Produces RuntimeError: Can't call numpy() on Variable that requires grad. Use var.detach().numpy() instead. with the following Traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "distrib_debug.py", line 6, in <module>
loss_np = - distrib.log_prob(a.numpy())
File "~/python3.5/site-packages/torch/distributions/multivariate_normal.py", line 181, in log_prob
diff = value - self.loc
File "~/python3.5/site-packages/torch/tensor.py", line 376, in __array__
return self.cpu().numpy()
RuntimeError: Can't call numpy() on Variable that requires grad. Use var.detach().numpy() instead.
Here, we are interested in learning the parameters mu and so we set the requires_grad = True in order to get the gradients computed. But, when we call distrib.log_prob(a.numpy()), we get the above RuntimeError which is misleading since the RuntimeError is suggesting us to detach() the mu Tensor (Variable) from the computation graph, convert it to numpy array and then call log_prob(...) which means the gradients for mu will not be computed – which is not what we want.
This will work fine if mu does not require gradients. For example, the following code will run fine:
import torch
mu = torch.tensor([0.0, 0.0]) # Note: requires_grad is False by default
sigma = torch.eye(2)
distrib = torch.distributions.MultivariateNormal(mu, sigma )
a = distrib.sample()
loss_np = - distrib.log_prob(a.numpy())
We will get the above mis-leading RuntimeError if even one of the parameters (mu or sigma) requires gradient to be computed.
You may notice from the comment in the first code snippet in this post that calling distrib.log_prob(a) where a is a Tensor will not cause this error. But this is not intuitive or explained in the logs even though we can use the validate_args parameter to explictly require validating the input arguments to the distribution functions. The usefulvalidate_args argument was introduced in this PR and was merged in March 2018.
In summary, to avoid some head aches due to mis-leading RuntimeError messages, you can set the validate_args argument to True when initializing a distribution like this:
distrib = torch.distributions.MultivariateNormal(mu, sigma, validate_args=True)
This will perform several sanity checks on the supplied arguments including boundary conditions and will raise useful/sensible value exceptions before they turn into puzzling RuntimeErrors. I think by default the validation of the input arguments to the distribution functions are disabled due to performance overhead. Good choice but stating this clearly in the documentation will help the users I guess.
